Games: Portal 2 Cooperative Mode

Cookiemonger and I received a copy of Portal 2 on Saturday, via GameFly. We started playing the cooperative mode that evening, and continued our game Sunday evening. We’ve nearly completed the cooperative missions, which is a shame. It feels as though the cooperative missions won’t turn out to be much longer than the original Portal… but some is better than none, I suppose.

Portal 2 is fun, and for all that it succeeds at in cooperative mode, I’m afraid of what it will ultimately fail at in the single-player mode. The fact that there are two modes of gameplay actually leaves me suspicious that the game will fail to deliver enough game on both — some, but not enough, especially since I assume it initially sold for full retail. Two halves does not equal one full game.

Still, playing the cooperative missions has been a lot of fun. Perhaps the most fun was how GLaDOS’s taunting in the early cooperative missions actually appeared to have an effect on us. She initially complimented both of us for clearly definable reasons, and then made ambiguous statements that only one player was pulling all weight of the team. CM and I have different play-styles, and… well…

Playing the game together actually revealed something about the differences in how CM and I approach the game — and games in general. She grasps game concepts instinctively, while I’m slower to analyze and comprehend them. However, once the game’s difficulty escalates, her intuitive method becomes less effective, where I’ve mastered the game’s essential skills and can overcome problems with determination.

The two approaches are complementary for this type of game, though they initially proved frustrating. I plodded through the early levels of the game, analyzing the game’s system while CM breezed through the levels, and in the mid-game, I was blowing away complex challenges that were combinations of many smaller concepts, which were collectively more difficult to solve with intuition alone.